Congressman Jerry McNerney issued this statement:

“I have long asked that the people of the Bay-Delta region have a seat at the table when it comes to any plan related to the BDCP.  I was pleased to have the attention of Governor Brown’s administration today and look forward to our meeting tomorrow; however, I will only be satisfied when I see concrete results. 

“The Bay-Delta communities have been kept out of the process that stands to decimate California’s greatest water resource, devastating the families, farmers and small business owners who rely on a healthy Delta for their livelihoods.  The Governor must include the voices of all stakeholders in this process, but to date, he has pushed forward with his deeply-flawed plan regardless of escalating costs and the effect it will have on Californians up and down the state, costing billions of dollars and countless jobs.

“Every viable solution must be examined, using proper scientific assessment done and accurate cost-benefit analyses before we move forward to reach a solution that will be equitable for all of California.”

Don’t hold your breath. As UOP analyst Jeff Michael pointed out here, a cost-benefit analysis will expose the project’s folly.  

The state officials I heard this morning on Cap Public Radio chirping optimistically that cities are used to being transparent, and will continue to be, or that it is unlikely public officials will refuse in an open meeting to turn over records, or that the threat of litigation will help cudgel them, are astoundingly naive.

Public officials hate to  turn over information. They hate friction, dissent, impediments to their agendas, true but embarrassing information and incriminating evidence.

Example: this column, catching the council accepting illegal cash benefits. the information for it came from a Public Records Act request. The information was acutely embarrassing to numerous officials. Is it not possible, even probable, that at least one official would have contrived to suppress the documents? And the illegal payments might have continued.

I could cite 100 other cases.

The idea that public officials will do the right thing just because is delusional. They’ll cover their tails. Nor will they have to refuse in an open meeting. Whoever said that on the radio must never have made a PRA request. Requests are made between the requester and an official outside public meetings. They’ll refuse in private. 

And litigation? What lone activist has the wherewithal to sue City Hall every time it flouts its obligations? 

Public officials want to cover up 1,000 inconvenient truths. And now they will.

“Yes, we understand we missed that deadline and did so willingly,” political consultant N. Allen Sawyer said. “We are working on a compromise.”

This is quite irregular. Usually when a political figure or political camp makes a major policy switch, they tell the public. Whether by a carefully scripted press conference, press release or speech. They don’t just abandon the effort or drastically change course, leaving the public in the dark until the press gets around to asking what’s going on.

But that is what the Safe Streets camp did.

The skeptic might suspect Sawyer’s explanation is a post hoc rationalization. And the truth is Safe Streets ground to a halt under the weight of its interior flaws and the mayor’s political weakness.

Mayor Anthony Silva appears to have stopped returning calls to this paper. I believe this is because unlike other media, we patiently research his claims and dismantle the false ones at length.

So I contacted Sawyer.

“We didn’t drop it,” Sawyer maintained. “We just aren’t going to go on the November ballot. June is a possibility.”

The Safe Streets camp commissioned a poll of Stocktonians. It showed — surprisingly, to Safe Streets’ backers — voters are willing to endorse The Marshall Plan approach – general tax, more cops, more city services, even debt payments — as long as they are assured public safety funding is secure, Sawyer said.

Plus, numerous business leaders and community organizations urged Silva & Co. to wait, Sawyer said.

Sawyer said Safe Streets will start up again if the Marshall Plan fails to properly fund public safety. “If that wasn’t there, we would be back in the driver’s seat,” he said.

Sawyer added that Safe Streets achieved its main objective: it put secure public safety funding on the agenda. ”I actually sincerely believe there is a desire for secured money for public safety now. And I don’t  think it would have been here if it wasn’t for Stockton Safe Streets.

So Safe Streets held back because polls showed voters would support The Marshall Plan, because community leaders urged caution and because The Marshall Plan group has been impressed by the mandate for secure funding. And, though Safe Streets is tantamount to the only reason Anthony Silva got elected, virtually his only major policy initiative, nobody said anything about this huge shift because … well, they just didn’t.

If the Safe Streets camp tabled their initiative because they realized it doesn’t integrate into the city’s bigger policy picture, they deserve to be commended. They made the right decision. For reasons I won’t repeat, Safe Streets would have permanently crippled Stockton financially.

Second, though, some of what Sawyer said is spin. Bottom line: the Marshall Plan has 6-1 support on the council. 

Safe Street’s sole vote comes from Mayor Anthony Silva. Silva started his tenure in self-inflicted political isolation — the Marshall Plan wasn’t rolling out fast enough for him – and he is now under criminal investigation. Developers Matt Arnaiz and Anthony Barkett may have had good intentions and intelligent concerns when they authored Safe Streets. But to say they did not hitch their wagon to a star is putting it mildly. The term ”cement galoshes” comes to mind. 

I doubt Silva saw the wisdom of compromise. More likely he experienced the netherworld of defeat. His attempt to sideline the council backfired. The council and city staff are devising fiscal and crime-fighting policy with a deliberation and a competence rarely seen in Stockton. Which is why polls support the Marshall Plan. Silva is marginalized.

A City Hall spokesperson said she was unaware of any compromise talks.

The lavish and utterly unsustainable free lifetime retiree medical plan, given not only to city retirees but to their spouses, was — depending which actuary you believed — a $540 or $560 million unfunded liability.

By settling retiree claims for $5.1 million, the city has settled for roughly one penny on the dollar.

Another way to look at it is that the medical benefit was estimated to be a $400,000 perk. Dividing $5.1 million by 1,100 retirees averages out to $4,636 per person — again, roughly one penny on the dollar.

That is the mother of all haircuts.

It is worth remembering that Dwane Miles, Stockton’s city manager 1991-2001, negotiated a huge expansion of the lifetime medical benefits. And a city employee could get free lifetime health care – spouse, too! — after only one month’s service.

Milnes also negotiated:

» The unaffordable “3 percent at 50″ pension for police and fire.

» Employer Paid Member Contribution, commonly known as pension spiking.

» 5 percent annual raises for retirees.

» 2 percent at 55 retirement for miscellaneous employees.

After dragging the city up the poorhouse steps, Milnes then became head of the retiree association. That bunch demanded the leviathan benefit be maintained. But first Milnes appeared before the council to say council members were clueless twits being ill-advised by City Manager Bob Deis.

To recap: Milnes did as much to bankrupt Stockton as any official. He was part of the reformers’ problem, not the solution. He acted superior before the council. And, in another tour de force of negotiating skill, he helped to win his group one penny on the dollar.

“Why should I continue to try to do business when low-level bureaucrats want to quash any opportunity to make a living?

 ”Slowly, I have been patiently building up my business with every event and opportunity that I could attend.

“… I got a phone call from Winnie Boyle, one of my favorite teachers at Edison High School that I have been subbing for the past 7 years … She wanted to know if her son Douglas could work as a pedicab driver during the summer …  I thought that if he wanted to get his permit for the city of Lodi then he may have a real chance of making money for the summer … 

“So last evening I trained him by giving some free rides to low-income kids at the Music in the Park concert at Victory Park while I picked the up paying passengers.

“After 30 minutes of riding in the outlying areas of the concert, a bureaucrat who identified herself as Jackie of COS – Community Events told me that I had to be 300 ft. away from the park because this was a permit only venue, and only the snow cone pizza guy was allowed to be the only vendor. 

“In fact later, the Victory Grill owner (whom we were advertising for free) told me that he will be serving hamburgers under the snow cone guy’s permit.  What kind racket does Stockton have going?  Who should I be paying off?

“Well, she proceeded to call the SPD who never came out but I am sure that a complaint will be filed against me when I refused to leave.  We just avoided going near her.

“I’m sure that this young man was put off with this experience.  And I makes me re-think that my next investment will be a Sacramento, Santa Clara, or San Francisco business licenses & permits instead of a 3rd used pedicab.  I have heard of other business people complain about permit expenses & bureaucratic BS in Stockton, but now after this 2nd incident I finally understand their plight.”

I didn’t call the “COS” abot this. It’s not necessary. One vendor had to get a permit; allowing another to operate without one would be unfair to the first. That — and not that pedicabs are good and harmless — is how bureaucrats think.

Because he’s largely accomplished what he set out to do. Or he will have accomplished it by Nov. 1, by which time the city will have a Marshall Plan to ensure public safety and a Plan of Adjustment to stabilize the city’s finances.

“A year in the life of a Stockton city manager of late is equivalent of a year i the live of Enzo, my dog,” Deis joked. “I feel I’ve been here 21 years.”

Deis said he’s worked 6-day weeks for three years with one 5-day vacation, along on which he took work. “My wife has put her foot down and said she wants her husband back,” Deis said.  

Deis did more than give Stockton a new benchmark for good city managment. He introduced a new paradigm of civic self-conception. Stockton, he frequently said, is dysfunctional (which we knew). The nice people remain silent while a cohort of angry, mean people with an acute distrust of government creates drama. And special interests have learned to feed off that dysfunction. Thus perpetuating the culture of incompetence and self-encrichment City Hall became.

The question is whether the transformation in City Hall will stick. Can a strong new City Manager be found? Will the new department heads (Deis replaced all the old ones) remain?  Have public employees become team players with a higher conception of public service? 

We’ll see. What can be said is Deis did all that was asked of him.

“It seems you have become the conduit for the sprawl debate. 

“So here are the additional points that need to be considered during the discussion of “sprawl” and its fiscal impacts. 

“Development fees pay for the cost of new infrastructure needed to serve the new development based on the impacts of that development.  It is unconstitutional to force a developer to pay for impacts not related to his project – that would be called a “taking”. 

“If a development creates the need for a new school to be built or a new fire station to be built the developer pays 100% of the cost for the school or fire station along with all the fire trucks inside.  But if a city is not maintaining its current fire trucks or a school district is not maintaining its current classrooms, well, there is no “nexus” between new development and the maintenance of existing infrastructure.  The U.S. Constitution protects property owners from the government forcing them to give up their property without due compensation, the same rules apply to those who already own and live in a single family detached house on a 5,000 square foot lot as to those who wish to build a single family detached house on a 5,000 square foot lot. 

“Ongoing maintenance of streets, parks and all other infrastructure is paid with sales tax, property tax, DMV fees, utility fees, franchise fees, use fees and a multitude of other fees applied to those who use them.  If a city is not properly maintaining its existing infrastructure you have to look to the city budget and see where they are spending their money other than proper maintenance. 

“Proposition 13 was a drastic shift in how government is financed in California.  In other states property mil taxes are used to pay for new infrastructure and the maintenance of that infrastructure after it’s built along with government worker salaries.  We don’t have that here.  Property taxes in California are a fraction of what they are in other states which means developers have to pay for 100% of the infrastructure instead of the general public through property taxes. 

“For this reason, in other states when less infrastructure is required for a project there is a huge tax savings for the local government.  That savings does not exist in California.  This argument works elsewhere but it doesn’t fly here.

“However, the infrastructure argument does have merit when you look at the ongoing maintenance question because if there is more infrastructure it requires more money to maintain.  The financial analysis becomes interesting when you delve into ongoing maintenance, primarily because how the revenue money is spent is a political decision.  If political leaders spend more money than they have, if they do not allocate enough maintenance dollars, there is a city wide problem.  A quick look around America, at the bridges falling down, at dilapidated government buildings at pot hole filled roads and highways, you can clearly see that no level of government is devoting enough resources to infrastructure maintenance.

“With the specific example of Fresno cited recently I direct your attention to the description used in the study about revenue and cost of service.  The study demonstrates that the cost to service a residential unit in a smart growth development is cheaper than it is in a traditional development.  $1,371 per year to service a smart growth unit compared to $1,566 per year to service a traditional housing unit. 

“The study also analyzes the tax revenue generated and demonstrates that more tax revenue is received per acre of smart growth than per acre of traditional development, $2,300 per year of tax revenue off an acre from smart growth and $1,600 per year of tax revenue off an acre from traditional development.

“Oddly enough the financial analysis stops at this point as if a bold conclusion has been made and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Consider that they used two different metrics in their analysis, “per unit” for cost of services and “per acre” for tax revenue.  By using two different metrics the results are not merely skewed they become indefensible.  Using these numbers from the Fresno study and applying them to the real world in fact proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that traditional growth patterns are extremely more advantageous to a city than smart growth patterns – provided that is that the numbers from the Fresno study are accurate.

“Finally, there is the issue of “freedom of choice”.  I believe people should be free to choose where and how they wish to live.  There are some who would like to dictate to others how and where they should live.  The interesting question is how do you know what someone would choose if given the choice?  In America that answer is most often determined by the price someone is willing to pay for a product.  You are willing to pay more for something you want and less for something you don’t want as much.  If more people wanted to live in townhomes or apartments the cost of those would increase due to the increase in demand for the product.  The fact that those products do not command higher prices shows the level of demand for them. 

“To argue that people want to live in townhomes and apartments but choose a single family detached house instead because there are not enough townhomes and apartments is an economically dishonest argument considering the price to live in apartments, townhomes and single family homes.”

I originally wrote a counter-argument to Beckman, but decided to let his response  hold the field for the time being. I commend him, Stockton City Limits and the other sharp cookies who have engaged in this discussion. I can’t help but to wonder how much better Stockton would have grown had such discussions taken place in council chambers before the last boom.

A 16 percent raise during The Great Recession — and a $2,500 bonus for accepting it.

Gov. Brown gave them 4.5 percent, and conditioned that raise in the coming year on healthy revenues. If revenues fall below a certain threshold, they don’t get it until the following year.

The effrontery of asking for a 16 percent raise in these tough times is stunning. And blinkered. There is no better way to lose public support than to strive to make public employees a privileged class separated by fiat from the tough times afflicting the people who pay their salary. though SEIU can live with that, apparently.

SEIU is a bellwether for other state unions. And state unions are a bellwether for municipal public employee unions. Whatever restraint and diminished expectations Stockton’s public employees have been cudgeled into by firm management and the fiscal reality of the recession will soon yield to similar greed. A 4.5 percent raise in this economy is questionable. But thank God Brown didn’t give the store away.